Recipe: Triage and route support tickets
1min read
TL;DR: When a new ticket arrives in Freshdesk or Zendesk, this playbook classifies it by topic, priority, and product area, sets the right queue or assignee, and posts a notification to the team's Slack channel. Trigger is a webhook from your helpdesk; outputs are an updated ticket and a Slack message.
Who this is for
Support teams that manually read and sort incoming tickets before work begins.
What you'll need
- Connectors: Freshdesk or Zendesk (first-party integration or MCP), Slack.
- Secrets: Helpdesk API key, Slack token (stored in Secrets — never hardcoded).
- Trigger: Webhook from your helpdesk on ticket creation.
How to build it with Ask Ballet
- Open the Console on Home.
- Paste the prompt below and adjust system names and channels.
- Review the proposed plan, confirm, and let Ballet build it.
- Connect Freshdesk/Zendesk and Slack when prompted, and add the webhook to your helpdesk.
Build a playbook that triggers on a webhook when a new Freshdesk ticket is created.
Classify the ticket into a category (billing, bug, how-to, feature request) and a
priority (low, medium, high) based on the subject and description. Update the ticket
with the category and route it to the matching group/queue. Then post a summary to
the Slack channel #support-triage with the ticket link, category, and priority.
What the playbook does
- Webhook trigger — receives the new ticket payload from the helpdesk.
- Code step (classify) — derives category, priority, and product area from the ticket subject and body.
- HTTP step (update ticket) — sets the category/priority fields and assigns the queue or group via the helpdesk API.
- Code/HTTP step (notify) — posts a formatted summary with the ticket link to Slack.
Variations and tips
- Route by language or region by adding fields to the classify step.
- Add an "Ask" permission step so an agent confirms routing for high-priority tickets — see Allow vs Ask modes.
- Start with a manual trigger and a sample ticket to test classification before enabling the webhook.